Month: August 2011

Yes, there are still lots of clients running 2007 and Microsoft is still pumping out those non-regression-tested CU’s for it. WSS 3.0 August 2011 CU Full http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2553022&kbln=en-us MOSS 2007 August 2011 CU Full http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=2553020&kbln=en-us More details about the updates: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2553022 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;2553020 After the patch, don’t forget to run the PSCONFIG to update the farm. While most of the time this works fine: PSCONFIG.EXE -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force My favorite is this: PSCONFIG.EXE -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures Because it works every...

So you turned on Enterprise features…. now you need to go back to Standard because lets face it, not everyone needs to pay for Enterprise…. so what is involved in disabling Enterprise features? It’s actually pretty straight forward. To remove the Enterprise Feature from all Sites and Site Collections and your farm, please perform the following steps: Create a list of all the Site Collection and Sub sites that are using the enterprise feature “Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Feature”. Then either run the following command or batch it using one of the following commands. For Site Collections Stsadm –o...

Title Application pools recycle when memory limits are exceeded. Severity 0 – Rule Execution Failure Category Performance Explanation Access is denied. Remedy In the Internet Information Services Manager, uncheck any memory-based maximums set for the application pools named above. For more information about this rule, see "http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=142692". Failing Services SPWebService (WSS_Administration) Another fun MSCryptic message from our good friend the SharePoint Health Analyzer. In this case, Microsoft has yet to allow us to separate out the HA rules to individual servers Unfortunately these rules tend to be an all or nothing approach, and in the case of this rule’s scope we get two choices: So, what this means is that if we’re running a medium or large farm and we’ve gone and separated out our various application pools so that the Central Admin (CA) and the Web Front End (WFE) are on different services and are in fact isolated, then even though everything is properly set up, because it does not see certain app pools on a server that it thinks should be there it flags the SPHA rule. Hopefully MS will someday allow us to configure the rules to run on a per-server level instead of just farm level. In the meantime, three possible solutions: Easiest way to make this rule go away is disable it second easist is to install the app pools/services it is expecting on...

Error message: The SharePoint item being crawled returned an error when attempting to download the item. I was getting my crawl logs filled with error messages when crawling a particular section of one of my web applications that house a lot of Project collaboration sites. After investigating this issue what we found is that our standard template for projects used that Gantt chart extensively on some of the pages since the visual representation of tasks looks so darn good. The bad news was that the crawler was having problems interpreting these views. The solution was actually fairly easy once we knew the issue. For some reason it appears that the search server is presenting its crawl request as a very old version of Internet Explorer (IE 4!). The solution is to change the registry settings that control the gathering manager to present the User Agent to a higher version of IE on the search server. Open Regedit on your search server. Navigate to this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager Change the value of “UserAgent” from “MSIE 4.01” to “MSIE 8.0” Reboot the server and run a full crawl to index the items that were erroring out. It does seem strange that in an environment that no longer supports IE 6 that Microsoft hasn’t updated this registry setting to a more modern broader/user agent, but this also explains why on...

One common scenario I’ve faced is the need to have a SharePoint database replicated to a disaster recovery site. Depending on the setup and how the DBAs have provisioned the backup databases, we sometimes face issues where there are orphaned users in the new instance. Here’s the fix for remapping the orphan database users on the new instance: /******************************************************* This procedure should be created in the Master database. This procedure takes no parameters. It will remap orphaned users in the current database to EXISTING logins of the same name. This is usefull in the case a new database is created by restoring a backup to a new database, or by attaching the datafiles to a new server. *******************************************************/ Use Master Go IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.sp_fixusers') IS NOT NULL BEGIN DROP PROCEDURE dbo.sp_fixusers IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.sp_fixusers') IS NOT NULL PRINT '<<< FAILED DROPPING PROCEDURE dbo.sp_fixusers >>>' ELSE PRINT '<<< DROPPED PROCEDURE dbo.sp_fixusers >>>' END GO CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.sp_fixusers AS BEGIN DECLARE @username varchar(25) DECLARE fixusers CURSOR FOR SELECT UserName = name FROM sysusers WHERE issqluser = 1 and (sid is not null and sid <> 0x0) and suser_sname(sid) is null ORDER BY name OPEN fixusers FETCH NEXT FROM fixusers INTO @username WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0 BEGIN IF @username='dbo' BEGIN EXEC sp_changedbowner 'sa' END ELSE BEGIN EXEC sp_change_users_login 'update_one', @username, @username END FETCH NEXT FROM fixusers INTO @username END CLOSE fixusers DEALLOCATE fixusers END...

Set up a new site collection recently and as I was going though setting up the team sites noticed that we were missing a lot of list templates. Not sure why they weren’t activated, probably because I was trying to create a clean site and using the “Blank” template to start with. It’s any easy fix though as you can just activate the features you want. What, SharePoint cant read your mind? Just go to: Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Manage Site Features -> Activate "Team Collaboration Lists" Feature. And viola! Your list templates are available for...